Juan Manuel Roca, the uniformity of self-contradiction

March 02, 2007 Roca was born in Medellín, in 1946 and has spent his life building a tower of words. At the top are fourteen books of poetry, published between 1973 and 2001 to honor and acclaim and which are translated into the most widely read Western languages. The fourteenth collection, La hipótesis de nadie (No one's Hypotheses) [1]was published last year and won Colombia’s most inportant poetry prize. Los cinco entierros de Pessoa (Pessoa’s Five Burials) [2], an anthology published in Spain, has a prologue by Héctor Rojas Herazo elucidating what Roca has always displayed in his poetry: a “uniformity of self-contradiction”.

The symbols, sources, styles, references, everything in Roca remains consistent. His ideas and poetics have not changed with time, but his point of view changes with each book published, always maintaining view of reality alien to reality, evasive or perhaps in the process of evasion. The consequence of this is the construction of a new landscape where calendars and clocks use different measures and history remains timeless through its great characters.

Roca is adept at using paradoxes, comparisons, superpositions and irony in order to create works that waver between a certain skepticism and a gentle nostalgia. He talks about the plundering of a world in ruins; he describes an inconclusive past and a present that one does not quite completely understand.

In Los cinco entierros de Pessoa, for example, he begins by placing poetry, the word or the message in the place of risk corresponding to life itself. There is nothing solid in this known universe where texts are slippery, out of control, alien. It is all there even though no conformist can put up with it. Roca knows that sterility is on the lurk, and is aware of that life brings with it curses in the form of doubts and glimpses of something that never was.

The props in Juan Manuel Roca’s poems are simple, he alternates the rural and the urban with their nearest elements to hand. They are mere accompaniments to the theme, just as this in turn accompanies thought, the fundament. In the Roca’s poetry, the interrelation of the senses becomes clear. They come together to announce to the reader that the idea is coming.

The passage of time in the poems offers all that is necessary to describe our dissatisfaction when faced with the absurd. Its course charts a future of old age and death. One perceives in the poet a resigned desolation, magnified when violence, injustice, and his mother country appear. The fleeting nature of beauty, of love and of life can be identified with the stream of words, so that its loss is nothing other than silence. All that remains is experience like remembrances that will also fade.

Someone must have dropped the word love
in the bathroom [3]

The literary references offer structural support to the poems: Baudelaire, Nabokov, Ungaretti, Vallejo, Artaud and many other authors are summoned to be in the same wagon in which the poems travel. The inclusion of authors and well-known figures is wholly justified as an essencial reference. Sometimes, everything stops at the same moment like in ‘Arte de tiempo’, where the suicide, the woman, the horse and Gregor Samsa occur on the same page, in the same stillness deposited in the hands of the reader, who acquires then the power to stop events or let them happen. Besides the literary references, Roca strolls through the most varied cultural landscapes: Ulysses, Heraclitus and Degas reappear in his verses so that history has new arguments in the same time and place. 

Roca is a writer of images, not a portraitist or a symbolist using thick brushstrokes. His images are made with the care of a miniaturist, in search of the allusion that can take the reader to the profound structure of things. His reflections always make sense, there is always a thought that ties images and feelings.

The poetry of Juan Manuel Roca begins with reality, with the concrete, with experience. It belongs to one of the most productive contemporary literary currents in the Hispanic world,  shared by Mario Benedetti, Antonio Cisneros, Ángel González and Alvaro Mutis. The simplicity of his statements and the semantic and structural clarity allow emotions to appear, unforced, in a direct and plainly sentimental form. In this way, Roca makes sensations, remembrances and afflictions appear faithful to a truth without euphemisms. Pains, personal and social, go hand in hand, without his frequent intimist point of view contradicting his social preoccupations or pride in his country:

The women of this country are capable
of sewing a button on the sky.
Of dressing him as an organist [4]

The metaphysical zone of Roca’s poetry is occupied by the ambiguity of the intangible, around the mysterious world that hovers over his verses. The confusion produced by dream, mirrors, ghosts and enigmatic beings gives rise to reflection, offering an essentialist vision:

If you find something alien in the landscape

if you are frightened by a presence that is felt
I advise you not to look at yourself in the mirror [5]

The poet’s internal gaze hovers permanently over the paths of doubt, and his verses tell of perplexity before the losses and discoveries of uncertain and concrete characters he calls “god”, “someone” or “no one”, and who are nothing other than fragments detached from the course of his experience.

In the fires, around the cauldrons,
we surprise ourselves housing
some sleepy god within the body [6]

Fantasy is just used in the measure required by conscience to flee from ideological absolutism and accepts, with due relativity, the wild swings of the world. Roca’s ghosts don’t frighten us, the beings that live inside the soul of the poet are, finally, the poet himself, his dreams, his recollections, lost illusions, life in transit.

Plasticity and sensuality are indispensable supports, without which Roca’s poetry would be destined to the obscurity of a meditation in the darkness. But experience is brought up to date through the senses:

Others talk with a smell of cinnamon,
For voice has a smell when talking about light
or about grief  [7]

Colors alternate with the fog of shadows and recollections; the greens, blues and reddish colors are explicit or suggested, and provide a counterpoint to the muffled colors of nostalgia:

When I turn off the light in the room
And objects lose their shores,
I am one more shadow arriving from the past.
Fog, again, visits me [8]

So much richness of detail, the power of the intertextual references and the clear use of images make of Juan Manuel Roca’s poetry a pleasant place which detains the eyes and the senses. It is a nook full of mirrors where the murmurs, odors, sounds and visions take us on a trip longer than life itself, take us to a place where you find the instant when lives change their opinions. Notes:

[1] Las hipótesis de nadie, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, 2006.
[2] Los cinco entierros de Pessoa (Antología), Tarragona: Editorial Igitur, 2001.
[3] From the poem, En el café del mundo (In the café of the world), p. 25.
[4] Arte del tiempo (Art of time), p. 29.
[5] From the poem Una carta rumbo a Gales (A letter heading for Wales), p.93.
[6] From the poem La palabra perdida (The lost word), p. 21.
[7] From the poem Relación de algunos habitantes (Account of some inhabitants), p. 97.
[8] From the poem Monólogo del anticuario (The antique dealer’s monologue), p. 116.